Researchers have demonstrated a lensless imaging method that amplifies the information in the x rays that scatter from disordered biomolecules, allowing the reconstruction of an image of a single molecule from minute fluctuations in the scattering from an ensemble of randomly oriented copies. Read more...

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User Facility Reps Climb the Hill to Brief Congress and Staffers

On Thursday, April 7, five Berkeley Lab national user facilities administrators and their outside user representatives (those who have benefited from access to a facility) visited Capitol Hill. Led by Berkeley Lab Head of Federal Government Relations Don Medley, the team spent the first part of the day briefing staffers from Senators Feinstein and Boxer Offices, and had a short conversation with staff from the Office of Representative Barbara Lee, before joining an even larger contingent from some 40 other user facilities from around the country.

The Berkeley Lab user facility contingent included Susan Bailey of the Advanced Light Source (far left), and ALS user George Cody of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (fifth from right).

Lab representatives convened in the foyer of the Rayburn House Office Building at the official invitation of several Members of Congress to hold an exhibition to educate Members and staff about the research being conducted at national user facilities, as well as the ultimate benefit of this research to the United States, under the auspices of the National User Facility Organization (NUFO). Several National Laboratory Directors participated, including Berkeley Lab's Paul Alivisatos and Oak Ridge's Thom Mason, who addressed the gathering. Director of the DOE Office of Science William Brinkman and Pat Dehmer, Deputy Director for Science Programs, DOE Office of Science, were also in attendance.

New DOE Structural Biology Brochure Features ALS Programs

The DOE Office of Science has published a new brochure touting Advanced Technologies for Biology, and it features the ALS Structurally Integrated Biology for the Life Sciences (SIBYLS) beamline, the National Center for X-Ray Tomography (NCXT), and the Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Biology Program (BSISB). You can read about the featured programs, and download a copy of the brochure on the DOE Web site.

UEC Corner

Call for 2011 Users' Meeting Workshops

Planning is well under way for the 2011 ALS Users' Meeting, which will take place October 3-5, 2011. UEC members
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and
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are the co-chairs of the meeting. Workshops are a core function of the Users' Meeting, where users explore new ideas and share technical details, and user communities coalesce. If you would like to organize a workshop, whether in a well-established field or a new direction, please contact either Jeff or Gyorgy soon.

With the development of the MAESTRO project at the ALS, changes are coming to current users of sectors 7 and 8. ALS management has a plan for accommodating users in these sectors throughout the next 12-18 months of transition. Your input on these issues is welcomed, whether directly to ALS management, through your beamline scientists, or through the Users Executive Committee.

All users are welcome to contact their UEC representatives to raise issues of concern relating to their own research, or to alert us to issues facing our whole community.

For the user runs from March 9 to April 3, 2011 (a period which includes two weeks of 2-Bunch user operations), the beam reliability [(time scheduled - time lost)/time scheduled)] was 97.7%. For thisperiod, the mean time between failures (MTBF) was 34.2 hours, and the mean time to recovery (MTTR) was 55 minutes. There were no significant interruptions.